Thursday, September 10, 2015

Breathing Some Life Into Bone Hill

Over the summer our friends headed north to their camp which put our current Dungeons and Dragons 5e campaign on hold. Rather than just letting everything hang in the balance while we waited for an opportunity to get together with them again, I decided to offer to run them through a game by themselves and they jumped at the opportunity. I started thinking about what to run and quickly decided to pull out an oldie but a goodie, the Secret of Bone Hill. Unfortunately it wasn't quite as good as I remembered.

Before I get a tirade of hate from old school gamers, let me explain. L1 packs a lot of information in there. In fact it is really more of a setting book than a module so it really is jam packed which is both good and bad. Lots of ideas to incorporate into a game but the detail is almost too much. Most of the townfolk are written up down to how much copper they have but how useful is this really? I'm pretty sure that the party won't be ransacking the entire town so I don't need quite this much detail. There are also some of the names. Well actually most of them. I'm sure they were very appropriate for the era that it was released but today... let's just say that they didn't age all that well.

All that said, it still has given me a great framework to build my adventure on and we are really having fun with it. We even had an entire session go by with no combat! How crazy is that?! Of course we also tried out the carousing rules and between the two of them they managed to win enough money that they became local legends. And of course this was right after they said that they wanted to stay out of the public eye. It's going to be interesting to see just how that plays out.

I have also been writing up the adventure as we've gone along, expanding on the original text with my own ideas and updating it to 5e rules. Some of this has been a challenge but overall I've really been having fun with it and so has the family which is the whole idea. I've also been recording the whole thing so maybe I'll actually post it here at some point as well. We'll have to see how it all pans out. Until next time...